Do You Kow How to Make Banh Tet ?

                Do You Know How to Make Banh Tet ?

           

            Banh Tet is a special Vietnamese dish  to celebrate the Lunar New Year, which called Tet. According to tradition, everybody gathers at the house of the oldest person in the family on the last day of the old year to clean up the house and get ready for the first day of the New Year together. Of course, people will make Banh Tet on that day. Because of tradition, on New Year's Eve, everybody in the family will also pray to the Vietnamese deity to bless the land, house, and the family, and people offer a plate with five kinds of fruit and Banh Tet. Those are things which cannot be absent in the first three days of the New Year. Usually, people will make Banh Tet at home, so every family member will sit together, talk about their past year, and wait until it is ready. The eldest person will teach the youngest family member how to make Banh Tet. In this way, everybody in the family will know how to make it. Banh Tet will be easy to make for people who know how to make it, but it will be much challenge for those who cannot cook. There are three parts to cook Banh Tet: prepare the materials, fold the Banh Tet, and cook it. If you miss any of these steps, your Banh Tet will not come out delicious. Thus, you also need to be patient.   

            The first part is to prepare the materials. Banh Tet is made with sticky rice, mung beans and  pork, wrapped in a banana leaf and tied by a cord. Thus, what you need to get ready is the banana leaf, sticky rice, meat, mung beans, and the cord. In Vietnam, my family always used a banana leaf from my back yard, so we could save some money. If you do not have a banana leaf at home, you can buy one at a market. When you use a home grown banana leaf, you need to spend a lot of time cleaning and drying it. If you buy the banana leaf, you just need to clean it a little bit. I will give you a tip about how to know which is a good banana leaf. The tip is to choose a big and dark green leaf, so when you fold your Banh Tet, you will have more room for everything that goes inside. A second thing that is also important ingredients to make your Banh Tet good or not, which is the core. For those who are vegetarian, you can skip this step, and to who like meat, you have to remember to use a special cut of pork to make this dish, which is the belly. After you have washed it, cut it the same length of the Banh Tet you want to make. Next, put as much salt, sugar, and onion as you wish, and mix it with the pork belly. Do not put in too much salt or sugar, and then let it sit there as long as you can. I recommend you let it sit overnight. The third thing needed is the sticky rice. You soak it in water at least overnight. To make the coloring for it, you need the green color of a polium sauropi or a pandan, which are vegetables. You can buy one of them at the Asian market. You need to wash it good, pound it, and then wring it to get the green color from it. The sticky rice that has sat in water over night should be dry. And you should blend it together with the green color you just made. For the mung beans, you can choose a kind without a skin. After washing them, put them in a pot with a little bit of water. Boil them until the mung beans turn tender. Then, you need to cool them down on a large plate. Then, knead them into a cylinder, and put the pork you already made inside it. Finally, you finished the first part. I know it took a long time to prepare everything, but think about when it is done. You will feel happy and want to try what you have put a lot of work into. So be patient!

   

              Before you start the next part, which is folding the Banh Tet, you need to ready the water that you will use to boil the Banh Tet later. Normally, people cook it only once, so use the biggest pot you have. Fill the pot with water to three fourths full, and turn the heat to low. In Viet Nam, when making Banh Tet, almost everyone uses wood to cook because it is cheap and traditional. By the time you finish folding your Banh Tet, your water will be ready. Before you start folding, you should know that you need to be really meticulous, and your Banh Tet will be pretty or not depends on how meticulous you are. First you need to choose a comfortable position because this step also takes a long time. Where you want to do the folding, spread out a big blanket. You need this because you do not want to mess up your pretty house. Then, put the core, sticky rice, banana leaves that you had made on the blanket, and let's start. In a banana leaf, put 1 cup of sticky rice. Put a cylinder of mung bean and pork on top of the sticky rice and fold the rest of the banana leaf into a cylinder. To finish this step, you have to follow every step I mentioned earlier. If not, your Banh Tet will not be Banh Tet. Use a cord to tie what you just folded, and use your strength to tie it as tightly as you can. This step is really important. If the cord is not tight enough, your Banh Tet will fall apart.

           The last part is the easiest, but you also need to be careful. When you see the water is boiling, carefully put each Banh Tet, one by one, inside the pot. Otherwise, the boiling water could burn you. If you are cooking two kinds of Banh Tet, vegetarian and non-vegetarian, you need two pots to cook them separately. After you put them inside, close the lid, and keep the heat on medium. While waiting for it to be ready, you can do something instead like clean your house, or cook another thing for the New Year. However, you have to go check it every ten minutes. Make sure the heat is still on. If you use an electronic cooker, you do not have to check the heat, but you need to refill the pot with water when you see it is dry. Usually, it takes nine to twelve hours to cook. Thus, patience is an important thing for a chef to have to make this dish. With my experience, if you put your Banh Tet in a pot at 10 in the morning, by 9 at night, it will be ready to take out. When you take them out, take them out one by one, and put them in cool water for a few minutes to cool them down. This way, your Banh Tet will be soft and tender.

            Even though I am not in Vietnam anymore, and my family and I cannot follow every Tet tradition, but we always try to cook Banh Tet at home to keep some air of Tet here. As an elder Vietnamese said, “ It's not important where you are now, just know that you are Vietnamese. You need Banh Tet, leopard flower, and a plate with five kinds of fruit on your table for Lunar New Year.” We made fake leopard flowers, have some fruits, and Banh Tet. We just wait for the count down in Viet Nam. At one o'clock A.M, we say “ Happy Lunar New Year”. I hope that you can make a delicious Banh Tet the way I have showed you. Good luck and Happy Lunar New Year!